Embassies in the East

The Story of the British and Their Embassies in China, Japan and Korea from 1859 to the Present

J E Hoare, J. E. Hoare

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781138863163
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136796241
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This text traces the history of three Far Eastern embassies through the vicissitudes of war and revolution against the background of an apparent steady decline of Western influence in Asia. Dr Hoare tracks the key events and people shaping the British view of Asia. Key 'dramatis personae' are Sir Harry Parkes, British Minister to Japan, China and Korea; Sir Ernest Satow, the student interpreter who became Minister in Tokyo and Peking, and in more recent years, Sir Charles Eliot, lover of big cars and scholar of Buddhism. This book will interest those wishing to know more about all aspects of Britain in East Asia, whether in the tense years of the Boxer troubles in China, during the wartime repatriation of Britons from Japan and the Japanese Empire, in the traumas of the Korean War, or during the excess of China's Cultural Revolution.

Part One
China

1
The Beginning: The Duke of Liang's Mansion and the Establishment of the Legation 1860-1900

It was the Treaty of Nanjing (Nanking) of 1842 which 'opened' China to the West and which established diplomatic relations between Britain and China. This was the culmination of years of pressure to force China to follow Western ways of commerce and diplomacy, a pressure determinedly resisted by the Chinese. Even when the principle of diplomatic relations on a supposedly equal footing was conceded by the Chinese, they continued to resist successfully for some years more the establishment of diplomatic missions in the capital itself.¹

Only after two years of fighting and the signing of the treaties of Tianjin (Tientsin) with Britain, France, the United States and Russia in June 1858, was the right to establish diplomatic missions in the capital conceded by the Manchu court. It was a right which the Chinese promptly sought to take away. The Chinese, whatever they had signed, had no intention of allowing the foreigners into the capital.² When Elgin's brother, Sir Frederick Bruce,* fresh back from London with the British ratification of the treaty, and now appointed British minister to the court at Beijing, and his French counterpart, M. de Bourboulon, together with the US minister, J. E. Ward, arrived at the port of Dagu in June 1859 in preparation for their entry to Beijing to exchange ratifications of the treaty, they were forcibly prevented from travelling.³ They left for Shanghai the following month, where they spent the winter.

In March 1860, determined to return to the task, they demanded an apology and an indemnity for the events of the summer of 1859, and the right to enter Beijing, as stipulated in the treaty. These demands were refused, and by June 1860, there was further conflict. By late August, Tianjin was occupied by British and French forces, and the two plenipotentiaries of 1858, Baron Gros for France and Lord Elgin for Britain, had arrived in the city to begin a further round of negotiations. During this period, the British interpreter, Harry S. Parkes and a number of his colleagues were captured, imprisoned and tortured. Most died and the incident became one of the justifications for the decision to burn the Summer Palace. Parkes, however, survived and will feature regularly in these pages.⁴ The outcome of all this was that the 1858 treaties were reinforced by the Convention of Beijing of October 1860. The right of diplomatic residence in the capital on Western terms was now firmly established. In Chinese eyes, it was perhaps less a right than a concession seized from them at the point of a gun. China's modern diplomatic relations could hardly be said to have got off to a good start.

The two embassies, the British under Lord Elgin, the French under Baron Gros, took up residence in Beijing on 27 October 1860 with a strong military escort. Writing some thirty years later, Parkes's biographers could not resist a degree of triumphalism in describing the occasion:

The representative of the Queen was at last within the walls of Peking. The long struggle of twenty years had ended in victory. Half measures were tried and failed, and tried again. At length the only step that could decide the issue for ever was taken, and what ought to have been done in 1842, what was obtained and abandoned in 1858, had finally, after a treacherous tragedy, been accomplished.⁵

For temporary lodgings, the British were placed in the mansion of one of the officials who had been responsible for Parkes's mistreatment; not surprisingly, Parkes found a certain satisfaction in this.

While in Beijing for the exchange of ratifications, both the British and the French ambassadors demanded accommodation for the permanent missions which both planned to establish. This the Chinese were obliged to provide under the terms of the treaties. That autumn of 1860, the French and the British were each assigned a palace to the south-east of the Forbidden City near the long established Russian Orthodox Church. This was an area long associated with the presence of foreign envoys in Beijing, for it was near the site of the hostel where the Korean, Annamese, Burmese and Mongolian envoys who arrived on their regular tribute missions were lodged. There they were also coached in the elaborate etiquette necessary for their presentation at court. Now it was to see the beginning of the official French and British presence in Beijing, and the birth of the Beijing legation quarter.⁶ Neither property was in good condition, and so it was decided that the ministers would withdraw from the capital for the winter of 1860-61, to allow time for redecoration and alterations to be put in hand. Junior officers were left in charge, entrusted with this task, while the ministers retired to the protection of Tianjin for the winter.⁷ They planned to return the following spring to formally open their respective legations in the capital, resisting continued Chinese attempts to keep them away from the city proper. Despite all Chinese efforts at procrastination, the French minister entered the city on 25 March 1861, and his British counterpart the following day.

The Liangongfu, where the British legation was situated, was the larger of the two palaces, and the British legation would always remain the largest of the legations. It lay to the west of a canal that ran north from the water gate in the wall of the Tartar or Manchu city to the Forbidden City itself. On the opposite side of the canal was another palace, the Suwangfu. To the south were Chinese-occupied buildings, below which was the Russian legation. Immediately north was the Hanlin academy, once the highest academic institution of Imperial China, with a famous library. By the 1860s, however, it was little used. On the west side, from south to north were to be found first, an open piece of ground known as the Mongol market, for sometimes traders from Mongolia actually came there, and then the Imperial Carriage Park. This, like the Hanlin academy, was much faded from its former glories. The Dukes of Liang, who owned the property, were descended from the Kangxi emperor, who died in 1722. By the 1860s, when its head was holding a command 'in the neighbourhood of the Great Wall', the family had fallen on hard times, and were happy to let their mansion to a foreign envoy.

At first, the new legation compound consisted only of the original Duke of Liang's house and subordinate buildings. Dr Rennie, a British army doctor who spent twelve months with the new legation, described it in some detail:

The Leang-koong-foo may be described as consisting of two sets of quadrangular courts, running parallel to each other, north and south, with a covered passage between them. These courts contain blocks of buildings, built in the ordinary Chinese style of architecture. The set of squares on the eastern side form the palatial portion, and contain the state apartments. The roofs on this side are covered with green glazed tiles, and supported by heavy columns of wood . . . The interior, though out of repair, is still very handsome; the ceilings of the state apartments being beautifully decorated with gold dragons within circles on a blue ground, which again are in the centre of small squares of green, separated by intersecting bars in relief of green and gold.

The western side of the compound had less showy buildings, but they still had 'elegance and great taste'. What they perhaps lacked in beauty was compensated for by curiosities such as the names given to some of the rooms. Those used by Rennie were in the 'hall for the nourishment of virtue', while the housekeeper, at that point still on her way from Shanghai, was to live in the 'hall for the study and development of politeness'. It was this western section of the compound that was first occupied, while elaborate repairs began on the eastern section.⁸ Outside, the mansion faced what in theory was the Imperial Canal, but which was in such a sorry state that most of the stone embankments that had once lined it had collapsed. According to a slightly later account, their collapse had contributed to the blocking of the canal, which became a series of stagnant pools in the dry season, and a sluggish sewer in the wet.⁹

The rent for all this was fixed at taels 1500 a year in perpetuity, abated for two years because of the repair work required. The tael then in use was the 'customs tael', valued at six shillings and eightpence (33 pence in Britain's 1999 currency) per tael, or three taels to one pound. The rent therefore was £500 a year, and, after the abatement period was up,

. . . for forty years [sic - in fact, no rent was paid after 1900] the rent was regularly paid, in silver ingots taken in a mule cart by the Chinese Secretary of Legation to the Yamen [the Zhongli Yamen, or Foreign Ministry, established in January 1861] every Chinese New Year.

Another version has it that the senior of the legation's language students went each year with the rent, wearing a top hat kept specially for the purpose.¹⁰

Both the French and the British properties were in poor condition, and there was a need for extensive repairs. At the British legation, these were set in hand under the care of Colonel Neale, later to be chargé d'affaires in Japan, together with a Chinese clerk of the works. Within a month of Bruce's arrival, Dr Rennie noted, there had been speedy progress, and the question of redecoration was under discussion. Rennie provided a detailed account of one estimate which proposed the use of various forms of oil and grease to prepare the surfaces for painting. For this the government contractor wanted Mexican $1050. (The Mexican dollar was then one of the many standard coins accepted in China and Japan, and elsewhere in East Asia, and prices were often quoted in it. Its value steadily declined from the 1860s to the 1890s, when it was replaced by other coins.¹¹) Another painter, who offered to do the same amount of work, quoted $750. Dr Rennie does not record which contractor was chosen, but, as we shall see, whoever did the work did not do a good job. Subsequently, other contractors were used to complete other pieces of decoration.¹²

In September 1861, an additional plot of land with some buildings was bought from one of the Duke of Liang's brothers. The asking price was taels 8000, but after some negotiating, the legation got it for taels 3500. This property had been briefly used by a Prussian delegation in May 1861, and would later provide a site for a hospital and accommodation for second secretaries. This piece of land and its buildings were made available for use as a medical missionary centre to the Anglican church, and later as a hospital. Thus began the close links between the legation and the Anglican mission. The premises were used again by the Prussian (by then North German Confederation) legation in 1866, but were thereafter firmly incorporated into the British plot.¹³

On 24 May 1861, Queen Victoria's birthday was celebrated for the first time in Beijing. To mark the occasion, Bruce invited the staff of the French legation to dinner, and toasts to Queen Victoria and Emperor Napoleon III were cordially exchanged. Another great event for the inhabitants of the new legation was the arrival of a 'large oil painting of Her Majesty the Queen in a massive gilt frame, sent out by the Foreign Office . . .' on 20 June 1861. The picture was by Sir George Hayter, and was life size. The Chinese workmen much admired it and all filed past to pay their respects. Markbreiter in Arts of Asia (May-June 1983) has a fine picture which is probably of the Liangongfu state apartments as restored with the Queen's picture in prominent position. The portrait was to have a remarkable history.¹⁴

The new legation clearly impressed its occupants. Rennie's enthusiasm is evident throughout his two volumes. Ernest Satow, later to be minister in Beijing, spent some months on the compound in 1861-62, studying Chinese before beginning the study of Japanese. He wrote of living in '. . . the splendour of the newly restored buildings of the Liang Kung Fu . . .' (Satow, later renowned as a pillar of rectitude and author of the standard Guide to Diplomatic Practice, and a friend amused themselves while in the legation by shooting pieces off the roof of the Hanlin academy next door. In the 1870s, other students smashed a hole in the wall of the Imperial Carriage Park in order to get in, an action that led to official Chinese protests.¹⁵)

Satow's friend, Algernon Mitford, who arrived in Beijing in 1862 as an attaché at the British legation, described the site and the general effect of the newly occupied building in equally enthusiastic terms:

Our Legation is situated in the southern part of the Tartar city. We occupy a most picturesque palace called the Liang Kung Fu . . . which like all Chinese buildings of importance, covers an immense space of ground. There are courtyards upon courtyards, huge empty buildings with old pillars, used as covered courts, state approaches guarded by two great marble lions, and a number of houses with only a ground floor, each of us inhabiting one to himself.¹⁶

Thus it was in the spring and summer. In the autumn, however, Mitford seems to have found it all rather less congenial. In October 1865, he wrote a graphic passage indicating the drawbacks of the wide courtyards and ancient buildings:

Outside the rain is falling fitfully and the wind blowing a hurricane, it moans and howls dismally through the courts and cranky buildings of the Legation, piercing its way into all sorts of odd nooks, and routing out old bells that jangle in a harsh and discordant way from the quaint eaves, as if they were angry at being disturbed in their dusty dens. Doors are creaking in every direction, and the windows threaten to burst in, but the stout Corean paper holds good, though it gets stretched and flaps unpleasantly like loose sails in a calm, and on the whole I confess I prefer glass.¹⁷

The truth was that much of the repair work carried out in the early days had not been of high...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Plates
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements and Thanks
• Introduction: The British in East Asia, 1600-2000
• PART ONE: CHINA
• PART TWO: JAPAN
• PART THREE: KOREA
• Epilogue
• Appendix: Substantive Heads of the British Missions in China, Japan, and Korea, 1853-1998
• Bibliography
• Index